[chef] Re: Velocity EU

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Nov 16, 2011, at 7:36 AM, Anthony Goddard wrote:

> I was lucky enough to head over to Berlin last week for Velocity EU where 
> there was a long discussion about using yum / rpms for configuration 
> management, deployment, the whole cycle. Aside an informal chat with the 
> Etsy guys about some new chef features we're both interested in, I didn't 
> hear anything else in the way of config. management. This was my first 
> Velocity (awesome by the way!) so I might have had the wrong expectations 
> but I'm left wondering whether a) are a lot of people using chef in web ops 
> in Europe, b) are there just no new 'cool' WebOps specific CF tricks these 
> days (answer - no ;) or c) everyone's got it all down pat they'd rather 
> talk about more WebOps specific stuff.

I used to live and work in Europe, and I still have a number of friends over 
there, so maybe I can speak to this issue a bit.

First off, Chef, Puppet, and cfengine are all tools that were developed in 
the US, and I think their development overseas has been a bit slower.  Sure, 
Mark Burgess has worked at the University in Oslo for years, but he's not a 
native European.  There is Chef and Puppet adoption over there, but not yet 
to the degree we have here in the US.

That isn't to say that folks over in Europe aren't some of the smartest 
people in the world, it's just that a lot of cool early technologies and 
tools tend to travel by word of mouth, and will generally tend to be more 
geographically localized during the early phases.

There is a Puppet conference scheduled for some time in March 2012 somewhere 
over there in Europe, and there are well-known members of the Chef community 
who live and work over there (including Stephen Nelson-Smith, author of the 
O'Reilly book "Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef: Bring behaviour-driven 
development to infrastructure as code"), just that there aren't as many 
members of the Chef community over there and I don't know if there are any 
Opscode employees over there.

Heck, the Chef community is just about to have our own first industry 
"un-conference" in Seattle, so it's not surprising that our adoption overseas 
would be a bit slower.


As for alternatives to cfengine, Puppet, or Chef, I'm not sure I've got any 
answers for you.  I can tell you that DevOps is still a new enough concept 
and I think we're a small enough community that it wouldn't surprise me that 
there are relatively few new tools in this space at any one point in time, at 
least when it comes to big paradigm shifts.

On the other hand, people are amazingly inventive and I am constantly finding 
out about new tools that I should have already known about, but didn't.  So 
maybe that's just my fault for being dense.


Anyway, I know that some of the people on #chef are from overseas, so maybe 
you could come on irc and ask them yourself?

-- 
Brad Knowles 
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SAGE Level IV, Chef Level 0.0.1